FOSSDLE PieFedYou can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.
lemm.ee/pictrs/image/ba84db7c-fc00-4eef-ba59-c5…
submitted by
irelephant 🍭
Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
Or you can be an instance admin. Iirc In the next lemmy version (1.0.0), mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.
You can already do this using tesseract, by the way (not tesseract.dubvee.org, strangely?)
On t.lemmy.dbzer0.com i can see both upvotes and downvotes (for all my modded comms):
I guess the feature was already merged in one of the past Lemmy versions then?
I think it's been implemented this whole time, but it's just that the default lemmy-ui doesn't show it
You can already do it with a database query iirc.
Yes, after all other servers need this information in order to prevent double voting, you can't just have servers sending each other information "somebody upvoted this" and also tell when servers are allowing users to vote more than once.
So upvotes and downvotes aren't actually private, never have been, some servers may display them publicly even if most don't.
The server hosting the post needs it.
It only needs to tell other servers the vote count, and the votes of people on that other server.\ That may not be how it actually works, but that's all that's needed
Yes, but then you can have malicious servers sending fake numbers without other server operators being able to check whether this is at all plausible.
(It's still possible for malicious servers to send fake votes, but server operators can see which users they are stated to originate from, then block that server if that looks like it's doing that. At least that is my understanding.)
It's only fake numbers for posts on the instance.
Not the first malicious instance, wont be the last.
What do you mean "send fake votes"?\ Or rather, who do you think should be responsible for identifying and blocking fraudulent votes?
And how do you reconcile votes that come from servers that you've defederated with? Should everyone have the same view of the post, or should people only see votes from servers that their server is federated with? What about votes from users you've personally blocked? Etc
I personally kinda think that the responsibility is on the server hosting the post, and that everyone should see the same (but anonymous) vote count, of which the hosting server is the single source of truth.
A malicious hosting server could use fake points to blast any message to the top of everyone's feeds until manually banned or defederated
I'm not sure how giving every server access to the votes solves that. \ The malicious server can make fake users to pump up votes. your server admin has to notice, then check the vote logs, then see what's happening and defederate them. That's pretty much what you described in your scenario, anyways.
Yes, that's happened before. They were sending a very large number of votes, so it was immediately obvious. Even a couple dozen from an unknown instance will be noticed, when an admin sees it and says "huh I haven't heard of that instance" and when they look there's nothing there.
Hashing exists for this use case
There are plenty of ways to handle double voting without plaintext user strings. The fact that it's done this way is just lazy and poor design and doesn't actually do anything to prevent a rogue instance from vote spamming with fake users.
Over thinking.
Only the instance with the post needs the username to register the vote, the count can then be updated by the instance. Simple and lightweight
They should be.
I'm not sure about the downvotes part (i failed to recreate this lmao) but you can already view upvotes with mbin. Piefed solves this problem with a option to make your votes private *but only with untrusted instances* (but from my tests it didn't work? weird)
IIRC, piefed's private votes are disabled for "trusted" instances. You can see which instances are trusted here.
Ah, well that sucks :( i thought it just used a different strategy to do so if it was trusted, not outright disable it.
Will correct it, thanks
IIRC PieFed’s method is to send the upvote using a second random username not connected to your username.
Damn, so this is how I find out we're least trustworthy part of the commonwealth.
That is stupid and defeats the point and makes me rethink my decision to support piefed.
Bummer.
It depends what your threat model is. Admins being dickheads about who downvoted what was the main issue at the time so I made it about choosing which admins to trust.
If future Lemmy versions show votes to mods (not just admins) then Pandora's box would be well and truly open so we'd need to rethink this.
Yeah I guess for me I don't really trust any admins. At the end of the day that's a permanent database of user activity which could be passed along to anyone, so ideally the minimum threat surface would be that it exists only on the home instance.
Also, I kind of just don't get the point of obfuscating for some and not others unless there are some politics going on behind the scenes, which just gives me even more cause for concern. I think this is a killer feature for piefed and really addresses a major concern I have with Lemmy so it is just disheartening to hear that the functionality has been nerfed for seemingly no good reason.
I hear ya. There was quite a bit of back-and-forth about it and we ended up with a compromise. It would be good to have more configurability of this to suit different preferences.
There's a niche out there for a max-privacy instance. No server logs, no email verification, automatic deletion of old content. And if it was running PieFed, no trusted instances set.
Not a niche I want to pursue but someone could.
There's no way that isn't going to be abused. Some marketing or tracking agency will setup a fediverse server and just collect all data like this for free. Or worse, take advantage of a friendica instance to bombard it with requests for data collection purposes.
This feature has been available to all kbin/Mbin users since the beginning, btw.
I wanna say it was built into Lemmy originally as well but they removed it from the FE
It’s in lemmy but only available to instance admins
This is nothing new. Fire up any ActivityPub server and you can see everything over the wire. As a Lemmy admin of my server of just me, I can also see it in the UI.
What can they use that data for?
It would only be usable data if they could show personalized ads to the users. They can’t.
All they know is that Meldrik up/downvoted this and that, but outside of Lemmy they have no idea who Meldrik is.
If you think metadata is worthless, I would like to make you aware about Snowden and his revelations. Look them up.
I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.
Cant you just defed with them?
If you can identify all of their instances, yes.
I think lemmy instance admins can see this too. Doesn’t even have to be a friendica instance
Any instance admin can see the vote history.
Same was the case on /kbin, and while Mbin got rid of the downvotes, it still has public upvotes.
kbin also got rid of the ability to view downvotes. I believe either before the fork or at least before the implosion while mbin were still mostly just pulling from upstream.
The whole concept of the Fediverse as social media is that all the data is public. Stop acting like these servers are giving out private data. This data has never been private, and it never will be. Data like this being shared with any other server is how ActivityPub and the Fediverse work.
I know, but some people assume votes are private.
If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually *tells* you that your votes are public, and they don't *look* to be public in the places you're likely to see!
It's not good practice. Really one shouldn't be assuming anything is private or some entitlement to privacy on a service where all content you post is made publicly available to any and all linked instances. They miss the point of a federated public forum. If one wants privacy, data must be kept locally only. That's why Lemmy has local-only communities, the "private" community aspect that many people want just won't be federated, because you can't make something like this private otherwise.
I know, but most people don't.
I know, it's a really big problem here and on the Fediverse in general because people get so outraged and entitled over something that just is the way things are, this wouldn't work any other way.
I don't think everybody knows that and at least here on Lemmy, it doesn't show it by default like friendica. The fediverse doesn't necessarily mean that all data has to be public. It's just that it's way harder to have a sense of truth without public data.
I was thinking that it would make sense to federate upvotes, but with the hash of your username instead of your actual handle. Would this work?
The userbase is small enough that hashing would be easy cracked by a determined person. Even with salting, iterating through the entire userbase and hashing each username+salt to check for a match would probably not take long
Replace "hashing" with "encrypted" (perhaps just using a symmetric key that the admin sets up) and then it gets impossible to know for any outsiders who is the real user behind the vote.
I for one just wish people understood once and for all that anything you do on social media is *public*.
If you are not comfortable backing up your opinion or action, then don't do it.
Assuming each user will always encrypt to the same value, this still loses to statistical attacks.
As a simple example, users are e.g. more likely to vote on threads they comment in. With data reaching back far enough, people who exhibit "normal" behavior will be identified with high certainty.
What if a uuid is generated every time a user signs up, and every upvote iterates through the uuids?
How long until it gets abused, and trolls start brigading though instances that hide their votes?
Nothing stops defederation, though.
That creates an incentive for trolls to create accounts at the popular instances using this mechanism in order to destroy their reputation.
But they can just be banned from those instances?
Or mentally unwell people stalking.
One of the advantages of votes being public is that it keeps instance owners honest and, perhaps more importantly, means they know other instance owners are honest.
If they weren't public it would be easy to modify your lemmy instance to send 10 votes with fake hashes for every real vote. There would be constant accusations of brigading and faking votes.
I'm honestly surprised it hasn't already become rampant.
Just make a rainbow table and get the usernames back.
This isn't just a Frendica thing; you can see this from Mastodon, mbin/kbin, etc. Many people seem to think upvotes and downvotes are private, but the reality is that they're publicly available information by default in ActivityPub. Lemmy just hides the information on the front-end for "normal" users; If you're a moderator you can clearly see everything.
If one wants truly pseudonymous voting, they're free to try out PieFed. See the announcement post for this feature for more details.
I mod a small community with like 6 monthly users, I'm the only one who post or comment and the average post have 3/4 upvotes and 1 downvote. And I always ask myself who is downvoting my submissions, because it's make no sense to me that someone take the job of pressing the downvote button on a link to a EDM set. Couldn't they just block the community?
Use https://tesseract.dubvee.org/home/all/scaled to show downvotes
Assess whether banning makes sense for someone who only downvotes content
How exactly can I see who downvoted? Can't seem to find it in the regular view, and the debug info only shows the vote count, not the voter.
I'd also like to know as I'm in the same boat you are. I'm just leaving this comment to remember to look later and see if you got an answer.
I've gone to my community and to specific posts, but can't work out how to show downvotes. Can you shed a little light on how to see them please?
It's not about blocking, it's about sending a message.
No, sometimes it is about blocking.
If you run a small community like several of us do, even a small amount of downvotes can completely shut down a discussion from ever being seen by anyone else. It's a way petty assholes have of trying to kill conversation in small communities because they don't like something about what you said or how you said it.
If someone neither wants to contribute nor lurk, and merely drag down a community, they shouldn't be allowed to continue to be a part of it at all.
I understand that if you are exploring on all and so, sometimes some communities you couldn't care less appear on the feed, it's happens all the time to me with sports news and related, but I just block them and move on.
Yeah, that's what I do as well. Seems much nicer than hurting their community by just randomly downvoting everything I don't want to see.
Some people just downvote for the sake of it.
I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I'd love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they're unique whilst obfuscating the original user.
Hash them with the post ID appended, so a user can't be identified across posts
There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.
True, but there are other benefits too. Bots can't crawl through your likes for example. Maybe you want a feature on lemmy or mastodon or whatever with anonymous polling? (ik masto has polls but for sake of argument) Maybe you're implementing anonymous polling into an app for a trade union that needs total anonymity even from admins? It's not totally unusual!
IMO it makes sense to do this at a platform level just because there's a unified implementation of obfuscation across all the fediverse for any platforms that want to use, rather than a bunch of unique solutions that would be duplicated effort.
I mean, seems pretty pseudoanonymous to me, unless Musk had another kid he named apj2k36 or something.
People have really weird usernames sometimes
I don't know this name, I read its part of the Fediverse... Does this affect us?
Yes, it is probably the oldest or second oldest server suite in the fediverse (diaspora is maybe older).
It was an early supporter of statusnet and pump.io, which are the earlier versions of ActivityPub.
It originally used it's own protocol to talk to other friendica instances, but a lot of plug-ins came out adding support for everything, even Facebook support for a while.
I wish friendica had a mobile app. I spend more time on my phone
Raccoon for Friendica is great if you're on Android.
Its webui is responsive (i think), its compatible with the mastodon api.
Petty mods or users would abuse this
It's already possible to see if you really want to look. Friendica is just another way.
Mods can already see voting data, at least through the API on the latest version of Lemmy.
How can I see this in the community I mod?
There are some instances that disable downvotes altogether!
Oof, hell no. That's some Facebook level cancer right there when they removed downvotes.
It's just a form of white washing that makes the same people who made up being offended by "black lists" and "master branch".
Some people seem to really hate down votes. I don't give a shit either way.
this is an icky issue because lemmy sends votes with empty addressing, so remote instances should count them but not show them to anyone. however mastodon (and *key) sends likes with empty addressing too, but considers them public. lemmy is (surprisingly) right here and should request that the rest of fedi respects the protocol and hides stuff based on its addressing. maybe open issues on mastodon and friendica
also this issue probably exists when seeing lemmy posts on any microblogging instance
I wish I could see what scummy lemm.ee mods removed my comments and got me banned
you can, names are shown in other frontends like phtn.app.
Thanks but doesn't work if you're site-banned.
You can usually use another instance that shows names if you have an account there, it'll show at least the federated stuff.
That's pretty cool. Sometimes in an argument there's that (1/-1) thing going on, would be funny to see how both are downvoting each other.
I was thinking just now how there seems to be people who downvotes threads for no apparent reason, even seemingly innocuous and neutral ones.. for example "Kingdom Come has sold 2 million units" 3 downvotes; "This New Algorithm for Sorting Books Is Close to Perfection" 5 downvotes; you get the idea. Now everyone is entitled to their opinion, but It makes me wonder if someone(s) is spam downvoting for some motive.
Might just be people who are used to having an algorithm so they dislike stuff they don't want to see more of.
Which is a problem
Every thread will get downvoted by someone for some reason. You would go insane trying to make sense of it.
That's true, but since witnessing the waves of spam that flooded Kbin before its disappearance, I try to keep an eye open for this kind of shit.
My guess is accidentally hitting the button while scrolling, and too lazy to change it.
The first isn't really interesting, and the second is clickbait. I wouldn't say there is no reason for downvoting them.
You are NOT supposed to downvote things that "aren't really interesting", you are actively ruining other people's user experience on here by doing that as downvoted posts get less visibility.
Some people might think it's not interesting because it's not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don't think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.
This is one of the reasons why I'd love to see a more expanded method of reacting to content rather than simply upvoting or dowvoting; something like, say, user-side thread or post tagging, with things like "verified", "clickbait", and mood reacts like "happy" vs "sad", and usefulness reacts like "solved, thanks" vs "closed as duplicate", etc. We need more and better axes.
(Axises? Axeses? )
Interesting idea, but how do you decide on what the universally-agreed on reactions are? Have too many and they may as well just be comments!
Well yes, the visibility thing would be the point. Interesting and relevant content is upvoted, becoming more visible to more people, and uninteresting and irrelevant content is downvoted, becoming less visible and shown to fewer people.
Your interests are not identical with interests of other people.
Who cares? If your upvote or downvote or any other activity you deliberately perform on a public platform is something you're embarrassed about and wouldn't be willing to do in a face to face engagement you probably shouldn't be doing it.
I agree, and if you absolutely must, then maybe make an alt?
The main problem is most people assume their votes are private, as they are private on reddit.
How to fo that?
Asumming you meant "do", go to friendica (friendica.world) and paste the fedilink (press the rainbow button) into the searchbar.